The last message that 17-year-old Zion Foster sent before she disappeared stated that she was on her way home.

The teenager told her mother and boyfriend that she was going out that night with her favorite cousin, something that she did at least twice a month.

But when her mother sought him out for help finding her the next day, the cousin delivered some surprising news.

He had not seen or spoken to Zion in years, he said.

This is the story of a missing person’s case turned murder, a story about a family, disturbing revelations, and the digital trail that exposed a killer.

Sierra Milton, a mother of six, awoke on the 5th of January 2022, to find that her eldest, Zion Foster, had not returned home the night before.

Zion was a 12th grader at East Detroit High School.

She had only just celebrated her 17th birthday in November.

Like most teenagers, Zion had experienced a rebellious streak.

She had threatened to run away from home and had even done so the year before, twice.

At 16 years old and frustrated with her mother’s rules, she had run to her grandmother’s house.

Convinced to return home, she remained for only a few days before leaving again.

That time, she caused enough concern for Sierra to call the police.

But it was another false alarm.

The teenager was struggling with her Granny’s recent cancer diagnosis, as well as her own desire for independence.

That January morning was different.

Zion had completed her serving shift at the Detroit Wing Company the night before.

She had asked permission to leave the house after returning home from work.

The teenager was honest about who she would be spending time with: her favorite cousin, Jaylen Brazier.

Under these conditions, Sierra agreed and watched Zion walk out the door.

That was shortly before 11:00 p.m.

The next day, the 17-year-old’s boyfriend, fellow high schooler Vertez Gonzalez, messaged Sierra.

Had she heard from Zion.

Because he could no longer reach her.

The last text message that he received was at 12:59 a.m.

It read “OMW,” meaning “on my way.”

But Zion didn’t make it home.

Calls to her phone went straight to voicemail.

Messages sent throughout the night were not being received.

Finally, at 8:53 a.m., he wrote to her, “Are you alive,” followed by, “This is the worst thing ever.”

Adding to the distress over Zion’s absence was the response Sierra received from her cousin, Jaylen Brazier.

Despite what her daughter had told her, Jaylen responded that he had not been with Zion the night before.

He asked Sierra exactly how often Zion had claimed that she was spending time with him.

Once or twice a month, she said.

He messaged her back in frustration.

Zion’s lies about him were “sneaky as hell” and “not safe,” he said.

But why lie about spending time at his house.

He suggested that she was likely spending time with someone who lived near to him.

Zion shared location tracking on her phone with her boyfriend Vertez.

This tracking had placed her just across the street from Jaylen’s home at 11:24 p.m. the night before.

Vertez, admittedly a bit insecure in their relationship, had taken a screenshot of his girlfriend’s location at exactly that time.

Jaylen suggested that perhaps Zion was using him as a cover story when she was in fact at a neighbor’s house.

She must know someone else on the street or nearby.

Jaylen helpfully suggested that Sierra go to the police, but he requested to be kept out of it.

Vertez was not as easily persuaded.

He inundated Jaylen with messages.

He confronted the 23-year-old with the screenshot from his phone.

In response, Jaylen sent back a video of his ring camera system.

There were no entries showing Zion at the house, he said.

She was never there.

East Point Police were not inclined to take Sierra’s missing person’s report with any sense of urgency.

Her daughter had a history of being a runaway.

According to the distressed mother, officers at the station did not mince words.

The person overseeing the case specifically told them, “I’m going to be honest with you, we’re taking this as she’s a runaway.”

Receiving little support from law enforcement, Sierra took matters into her own hands.

With the assistance of family and friends, a search effort for Zion was launched.

In the following days, they posted flyers, held rallies, and spoke to the media.

“We need your eyes,” Sierra pleaded.

“The police need your help.”

In the meantime, officers were eventually sent out to speak with Jaylen Brazier.

Jaylen, Zion’s self-professed favorite cousin, was in fact first cousins with her former stepfather; that is, he was cousins with Sierra’s ex-husband.

At 23, he was a father to two young children and he had a long-term partner, Katrina Smith.

Sierra believed that her daughter and Jaylen had always been and remained close.

According to Jaylen, they hadn’t spoken in years.

Police found him at home with Katrina.

Jaylen invited the officers in to look around the house.

He told them that he had last seen his cousin nearly a year before, in May 2021.

Jaylen continued to explain that it was Zion’s mother and her boyfriend that seemed fixated on the idea that she had been with him that night.

He had offered to show his ring camera footage to Sierra as well.

When she took a look at it, the mother thought that there were gaps in entries for footage for the night of January 4th, which had obviously been deleted.

But, Jaylen insisted, “she was never here.”

East Point Police found nothing suspicious in the search of the house.

There were no indications that Zion had been there.

They listened while Jaylen explained his frustrations over being pulled into the drama caused by a 17-year-old cousin with whom he rarely spent any time.

“She’s known to be a runaway,” he told the officers.

“She’s ran four times and every time she got a dude’s house.”

“Her mom knows this.”

“Her mom’s just playing it a certain way and it’s making me so uncomfortable.”

Jaylen may have been fooling the East Point Police at this stage, but not Sierra Milton.

She did indeed watch to see who her daughter left with from the house.

She often greeted Jaylen herself in the driveway when he came by to collect her.

She knew he was lying.

“He told me he hadn’t seen or been in contact with her for 3 years,” Sierra later said, “which is impossible when you were in my driveway and gave me a hug.”

Perhaps the easiest way to verify if Zion had been across the street from her cousin’s house, as her location data suggested, was to check the neighbors’ doorbell cameras.

At about 11:15 p.m. on January 4th, a white sedan, the car known to be driven by Jaylen Brazier, was captured pulling into his drive.

Emerging from the vehicle were two individuals, clearly seen walking into the house: one male and one female.

Jaylen had driven Katrina to work at just before 11:00 p.m. that night.

She was on the midnight shift at a manufacturing job, a shift that spanned from 11:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.

The second individual who entered the house at 11:15 could not have been Katrina.

Phone location data would later confirm the two individuals captured entering the home: Jaylen Brazier and Zion Foster.

The camera did not show Zion leaving.

At 1:41 a.m., the same camera from across the street captured Jaylen pulling his car out of the drive and then backing it in.

The trunk then faced the backyard.

After a few minutes, the car drove off.

It returned to the house less than 10 minutes later.

Search warrants were obtained for the house and the car.

Inside the house, the search was fruitless.

The contents of the car were carefully itemized and examined, but there was no clear evidence indicating what had happened to Zion.

That is, until law enforcement brought in the cadaver dogs.

The dogs clearly indicated at the trunk of Jaylen’s car.

On January 19th, the 23-year-old, accompanied by a friend who was a lawyer, voluntarily sat down with detectives.

It was clear that he had lied about being with Zion on the night that she disappeared.

Jaylen came forward to offer what he claimed was a truthful version of events from that night.

He had picked up Zion from her home and brought her back to his place.

He put his two children, boys aged one and two years old, to bed, then joined Zion downstairs in the living room.

They started smoking marijuana, watching TV, and just chilling.

“She’s telling me about how her and Mom’s relationship is a lot better… about her boyfriend, about prom… and how she’s working on getting an apartment,” Jaylen claimed.

Jaylen said they smoked some marijuana, which appeared to make Zion very sleepy.

He saw her head tilt back as though she intended to take a nap while sitting upright on the couch.

At that point, he went into the other room to pour himself a drink.

“I came back,” he said, “and she was thinking she was tired and she laid her head back.”

“About 15 to 20 minutes after that, I was like, ‘okay, are you good, you ready to go home,’ and she wasn’t responding.”

Jaylen reported that Zion’s pulse was faint, then he described her heartbeat as non-existent.

His young cousin had simply died on his couch, he said.

Instead of contacting 911, he panicked.

Not knowing how she died, he thought it would appear as though he had killed her.

“Her heartbeat was getting very, very faint and her breathing was like not existing,” he told detectives.

“I freaked out.”

“Like, okay, well, this looks terrible.”

“This looks very bad.”

“I didn’t know what to do.”

“So I took her, I put her into my trunk.”

“I put her in my trunk, okay, in my car.”

“And I took her… and put her inside of a trash can.”

Detectives queried how Jaylen knew that Zion was dead.

According to his story, the 17-year-old had inexplicably and very abruptly stopped breathing.

He checked her pulse, he said, and “there was nothing at that point.”

“She wasn’t breathing, so I assumed that was dead.”

“Couldn’t read heartbeat, couldn’t feel heartbeat or anything.”

“So I would say she was dead, definitely.”

Jaylen led detectives to the dumpsters in Highland Park where he claimed to have left Zion’s body weeks before.

Jaylen told detectives that Zion had been at his home for roughly two hours before she died.

This would have placed her time of death at just past 1 a.m.

Cell phone records showed her device drop off the network at 1:15 a.m., corresponding to the time that she stopped responding to messages from Vertez.

Jaylen told detectives that he had not deleted any data from his device since the night of Zion’s death.

They found, however, that he had conducted a full factory reset of his phone just two days later, effectively wiping everything held on his device.

Nonetheless, the movements of his phone could be pieced together.

This data placed Jaylen at the dumpsters at Highland Park at 1:48 a.m.

He claimed to have placed her in the dumpster to the right.

There was no longer any sign of her.

Sierra Milton was devastated by the news.

“He said that my baby just died,” she recounted, “and then that he threw her in a dumpster like she was trash.”

When Jaylen sat down for a follow-up interview the next day, January 20th, inconsistencies began to emerge in his story.

He now claimed that the two had taken acid (LSD) that night.

It was her response to the psychedelics that must have caused her heart to stop.

Of course, this explanation was about as likely as his previous assertion that the marijuana had caused her death.

The detective attempted to leverage these new claims to compel a confession.

Perhaps Jaylen would use the drugs as an excuse for his actions, for whatever steps he took to kill his younger cousin.

“The problem with those drugs are when you’re on them, you don’t know what you’re doing,” the detective proposed.

“If you did something under the influence, I need to know that, because that’s a big difference.”

The detective failed to elicit a confession.

Without this admission and without locating Zion, there was not enough evidence to proceed with an indictment for murder.

Jaylen was placed under arrest and held in custody for one count of lying to police.

In June of that year, Jaylen spoke with detectives again.

This time, he changed his story once more.

Jaylen recanted his claim that the two had taken acid that night.

That part was not true, he said.

He had felt pressured by police to offer more information, so he made up a more elaborate story to appease them.

Garbage collection trucks working in Highland Park were tracked to specified areas in local landfills.

The task of sorting through mounds of trash from all over the Detroit area, compiled over several weeks, was a daunting undertaking.

An estimated eight-week project was launched.

Dozens of volunteers, mostly wearing masks and hazmat suits and assisted by heavy machinery, picked through layer after layer of the landfill, systematically looking for any sign of Zion.

Meanwhile, Jaylen Brazier faced up to four years in prison for the lies he had told police.

He pleaded his case to the judge at his sentencing.

“One, I did turn myself in,” he argued.

“Yes, I lied, but I was not in the right state of mind.”

“There was no way for me to prepare for a situation like that.”

“I was scared.”

“I don’t know exactly how she passed… I just know one minute she was cool, she was fine… next thing I know, she was dead.”

“I did not cause it.”

“I reacted stupidly off of fear and panic like I’ve never felt before in my life.”

“I wish I could take it back,” he concluded.

“I would have called the ambulance, called her mom.”

Jaylen Brazier was sentenced to 23 months in prison.

Jaylen’s phone calls home to his girlfriend Katrina and other family members were monitored closely while he was in custody.

Occasionally, he would use another inmate’s calling code to make his phone calls in a failed attempt to keep his conversations private.

Repeatedly in his calls, Jaylen would ask if “anything major” happened.

This seemed to be a poorly concealed attempt to ask whether the massive search of the landfill had located anything or anyone.

His concerns over the search for Zion were telling.

If his story was truthful and she had died abruptly from an unknown, non-violent cause, there would be every reason for him to want her found.

Finding Zion would exonerate him.

Curiously, over and over again, he expressed his relief that no “major developments” had occurred in the search.

As the final days of the landfill project drew near, he referred to it as a “search for Cox.”

“Today is the first, tomorrow’s the second,” he said in one call.

“That’s… stop the Cox thing here.”

Jaylen served just over nine months before being granted early release.

He had been placed in a special 90-day incarceration program, a “boot camp” designed to reward inmates with early release.

It had been nearly a year, Zion had not been found, an indictment for murder had not been sought, and now the prime suspect returned to his home and his family.

Jaylen Brazier’s freedom, however, was short-lived.

On the 13th of June 2023, after a year-and-a-half investigation, the Detroit Police Department was finally granted a warrant for his arrest.

The 24-year-old would face charges of second-degree murder as well as tampering with evidence.

Upon his arrest for Zion’s murder, two additional cell phones were taken.

Despite the factory reset that he performed on his device, investigators were able to retrieve some of his activity.

His search history had been held in cloud storage.

On January 7th, three days after dumping his cousin’s body in a dumpster, Jaylen performed a handful of Google searches.

“Are garbage trucks also compactors.”

“What is the force of a garbage truck compactor.”

“How do police get your phone history.”

“How do you know if police are watching you.”

In addition to these incriminating searches, investigators found that in the months before the incident, Jaylen had performed a number of disturbingly suggestive searches for pornographic content containing the words “cousin” and “step cousin.”

Experts were able to retrieve the video results of these searches, some of which were reportedly very violent as well as graphic in nature.

Zion’s previous cell phone was safe at home.

Sierra Milton handed this device over to police.

On it, they found months of correspondence between her and her “favorite cousin.”

The messages he sent ranged from subtle and unsettling to deeply inappropriate.

At times, the messages were sexually explicit.

Over 4,000 distinct texts were retrieved from Zion’s old device.

In them, Jaylen routinely invited her over to his home while his girlfriend was away.

He offered to put her up in his basement if she ran away from home.

He also advised her on how she might evade police if she ran away once more.

Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Ryan Elsie described the texts as pervasive and as clear “grooming.”

He was at times complimentary of her intelligence and looks, and at other times probing in an immature way.

For example, he suggested to her that other people thought that they were a couple.

He said Katrina, the mother of his children, was jealous of her.

He then bragged to Zion about how easily he could get with women, at one point calling himself a “god.”

Prosecutor Elsie concluded that the 23-year-old had been grooming his younger cousin for years, that he fantasized about her, and that on January 4th, he must have acted on his impulses.

This was the twisted motive that led to her death.

Jurors also heard about how Jaylen learned that Katrina was pregnant with their third child on the day that he brought Zion to his house.

Messages between the couple showed how he had lied to her about what he was doing after he dropped her off at work.

Her nausea and hot spells had led to a trip to the emergency room earlier that day.

Hours later, the nausea resumed.

She messaged repeatedly that she felt too ill to remain at work and asked him to pick her up.

At 1:25 a.m., she wrote, “I think I need to come home.”

At 1:26, “I don’t feel good.”

A few minutes later, “My stomach hurts, I feel sick and keep getting hot and cold.”

Jaylen’s response was simply, “You can make it baby.”

He did finally pick her up that night at nearly 3:00 a.m.

When he did so, she noticed a deep scratch across his collar bone.

He told her that the cat had scratched him, deep enough to draw blood.

Odd, Katrina thought, the cat had never scratched that deep before.

As the case approached trial, a preliminary hearing offered Jaylen’s defense team a new theory.

At the hearing, Vertez Gonzalez testified that he believed his girlfriend was taking regular medication for epilepsy.

He told the court that Zion told him that she had seizures, and that without her medication, they became more frequent and severe.

In one instance, Vertez saw Zion become momentarily faint, slouching forward before regaining her composure after just a few seconds.

This episode, he believed, could have been a seizure.

This new information presented Jaylen’s version of events in a new light.

Perhaps Zion’s condition led to her death suddenly in his living room.

But Sierra Milton, whose youngest child was in fact diagnosed with such a condition, testified that this was not the case.

Zion had never suffered a seizure.

Hundreds of pages of medical records covering years of treatment appeared to support Sierra’s assertion.

The trial lasted two full weeks.

In May 2024, Jaylen chose not to testify.

The state called 32 witnesses; the defense did not call any.

The case against Jaylen was largely circumstantial, though it was nonetheless compelling.

A forensic anthropologist who reviewed Zion’s medical history determined that the only condition that she suffered that could possibly have led to her death was asthma.

An asthma attack, however, would present as the exact opposite of what her cousin described.

Instead of quietly passing out and experiencing a faint heartbeat, Zion would have been struggling to breathe.

It would have been very clear that she was in distress.

Vertez repeated his testimony that Zion had told him that she suffered from seizures, but he also admitted that his girlfriend was known to fib quite a bit.

It seems that Zion had liked to tell stories.

The prosecution summed up the case against Jaylen.

He was afraid of getting caught for marijuana, the defense claimed.

“You can use your common sense,” the prosecutor told the jury.

“It’s about the equivalent of a parking ticket.”

“You ever heard of somebody getting rid of a body to avoid a parking ticket.”

Sierra Milton and the rest of Zion’s family waited as the jury went into deliberations.

“Just so many inconsistencies,” Sierra said.

“Hopefully… they will see those inconsistencies, see through the lies, and see the truth: that he murdered my daughter and he disposed of her with absolute disregard for her life.”

The jury returned in only 30 minutes.

Jaylen Brazier was found guilty of second-degree murder and guilty of tampering with evidence.

Jaylen Brazier maintained his innocence of the murder at his sentencing hearing.

“I know that the picture is already painted,” he told the court.

“Zion was not in anyway victim… that wasn’t hurt at all.”

Before announcing his decision, Judge Donald Knapp outlined the convict’s failure to accept any responsibility for the murder, for the disposal of Zion’s body, for lying to police, and for causing so many delays in the investigation.

The father had left his two young children alone in the house, he manipulated and lied to family, and ultimately, he acted alone.

It was unlikely, according to Judge Knapp, that he would ever be rehabilitated.

Jaylen Brazier was sentenced to 30 to 90 years in prison for the murder, and another 5 to 10 years for tampering with evidence.

These terms are to be served consecutively.

“My body was trembling,” Sierra said after the sentencing.

“But man, when it was read… I was so happy.”

“They saw she was loved.”

“She is loved.”

“She was fought for, and this is the result.”

“And for Jaylen, you thought you were smart.”

“You tried to be slick.”

“The people saw you for what you are.”

“I hope you never get out.”

Zion Foster’s body has never been recovered.

Over 70 volunteers and law enforcement searched the landfill for nearly six months before finally admitting defeat.

Jaylen Brazier remains incarcerated, having been brought to justice by a mother who refused to give up.